£449 Dell Inspiron 17: A desktop replacement laptop with some allure

Dell sells the new Inspiron 17 model for a mere £449, a price that includes shipping and VAT. The laptop is surprisingly affordable and yet comes with some cracking specification.

It runs on an Intel Core i5-3337U processor, one which is based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, clocks at up to 2.7GHz (base clock speed is 1.8GHz), has two cores, a TDP of 17W and 3MB cache. It is worth noting that the Samsung Series 5 Ultra and the Toshiba Kirabook Ultrabooks also use it.

The Inspiron 17 also features 4GB of RAM (one memory slot), one year warranty (next day in-home service), 15 month subscription to McAfee SecurityCentre, Windows 8, an AMD Radeon HD 7670M GPU with 1GB of memory, Wi-Fi, a massive 1TB hard disk drive, a DVD writer, Bluetooth 4.0, 90 days premium telephone support and a 17.3in display with a 1,600 x 900 pixel resolution, that's 37 per cent more pixels than a 1,366 x 768 model.

Other notable points include a free bundled Cyberlink application, a card reader, a 6-cell 65Whr battery, a dedicated numeric keypad and a rather slim display bezel. Check out our review of the Dell Inspiron 17 laptop (albeit a slightly different model).